The Official Rackspace Blog » Managed Cloudhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog
The Official Rackspace BlogTue, 03 Mar 2015 17:16:10 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1Don’t Be Held Hostage By Ransomware Hackershttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/dont-be-held-hostage-by-ransomware-hackers/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/dont-be-held-hostage-by-ransomware-hackers/#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 16:00:32 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37696Your data footprint is getting larger. From documents and contracts to family photos and beloved songs, your data and files are important pieces of your life – both business and personal.

What would you do if you could no longer access your data?

There’s been a recent rash of scams and viruses like CryptoLocker and CryptoWall that want to use your data to extort you. These scams work like this: you click on a legitimate-looking link in a phishing email, and a piece of malware on your hard drive comes to life and instantly encrypts all of the files on your machine. You can’t access anything – photos, documents, music files: you name it. From there, you receive a ransom note from the hacker telling you that your files are encrypted. It will cost you a fee, typically about $500, to decrypt them. And the cost to retrieve your files increases the longer you wait to pay. Failure to pay in a timely manner results in your files being destroyed and forever lost. These scams are called “ransomware” because the hackers hold your data for ransom and you don’t receive a decryption key until you pay them.

At Jungle Disk®, a service of Rackspace, we’ve seen some of our customers become victims of ransomware, and we’ve walked them through recovery without their having to pay to decrypt their data and with no data loss.

Here are five tips to avoid falling victim to ransomware:

Backup Your Data

Data backups are imperative. Frequent backups ensure that the most recent versions of your files are stored. That way, if a hacker holds your data for ransom, you can quickly and easily restore your files with little data loss and without having to fork over a small fortune.

Be Wary Of Attachments

Companies aren’t your Aunt Sally. Odds are that banks, stores and other entities won’t send you an email containing an attachment. And if you receive one, don’t open it. It could be a trap designed to infect your computer with ransomware.

Install Security Software

Be sure you have security software installed and be sure it’s up-to-date. New malware surfaces every day, so keeping current with your anti-virus software helps keep your data safe.

Find The Right Provider

Find a data storage and backup provider that helps you keep your data safe and out of harm’s way. Some things to look for include: a provider that has the ability for you to save versions of your files, which allows you to revert back to an older version that is not infected or encrypted to quickly and easily restore all of your files; and one that does not unlock your files to parse them and save server space. It’s also important to know who holds the keys to your data – you or your provider. With Jungle Disk, you generate an encryption key that you keep. Unless you give us access, we can’t see your data or unlock your files. No one but you can.

Paying Doesn’t Always Solve The Problem

Fight the instinct to pay immediately. If you have the right provider and have performed backups, you (and your data) should be able to weather the ransomware storm. You have no guarantee that the hackers holding your data hostage will relent once you pay. There have been many reports of victims paying the ransom, yet their files remain locked an inaccessible.

Those are some simple steps to help you stay safe and avoid falling victim to ransomware hackers.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/dont-be-held-hostage-by-ransomware-hackers/feed/0Cloud Office At Rackspace – A Year In Reviewhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-office-at-rackspace-a-year-in-review/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-office-at-rackspace-a-year-in-review/#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2015 16:00:18 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37701Cloud Office at Rackspace thrived in 2014 with major product developments and huge customer wins. Each year Cloud Office teams strategize on how to provide the best services and products for our customers worldwide. The execution of those strategies in 2014 resulted in a mega year for Cloud Office and our customers alike.

Microsoft Lync at RackspaceMicrosoft Lync from Rackspace is the comprehensive instant messaging tool that enables voice and video calls for easier team collaboration and improved employee communications. We offer you a choice between per user Hosted Microsoft Lync and fully customized Dedicated Microsoft Lync, which lets you select the best messaging solution for your business collaboration needs.

Google AppsCloud Office at Rackspace now offers Google Apps for Work, delivered with the Rackspace Fanatical Support our customers know and love. You can use Google Apps to improve productivity while relying on our team of Google Apps specialists to help with application management and support.

Cloud Office at Rackspace will continue its strong momentum into 2015 and beyond with more new products, product enhancements and service improvements to help us serve you and your productivity needs in the best ways possible. Click here to learn more about all of our Cloud Office offerings and have a Happy New Year!

Closing a deal isn’t mechanical. Software doesn’t make a sale. Sales reps need more than a one-size-fits-all way to manage a deal and wow a buyer. There needs to be a connection.

At BuyerDeck, we see it this way: a more transparent sales process drives better engagement with buyers and drives more deals. It’s startlingly simple, and it begins by creating a relationship between buyers and sellers – that is paramount.

I had the vision for BuyerDeck almost by accident. I was working on a huge enterprise deal at my former company. I was under a lot of pressure and I accidentally shared my notes on the deal with the prospect. I shared EVERYTHING – project summaries, events, finances, you name it. It was information we would never have shared. And when the prospect called me a few days later, I swallowed my pride and apologized. To my surprise, he thanked me for the notes and had even updated them from his side. My mistake is what closed the deal and opened up a new level of transparency and engagement between the buyer and I.

On the surface, BuyerDeck is a portal for sales reps to manage deals with buyers. It’s a tool to capture and share sales insights in an elegant way. Reps can get specific, sharing case studies, product info, timelines and milestones to give the buyer and themselves a complete snapshot of progress. And buyers can add their own insight throughout the process. It keeps everyone on the same page.

As a startup, we focus heavily on innovation. We have to balance high availability and innovation while creating a tool that connects buyers and sellers in real time and closes that feedback loop.

A product like ours demands infrastructure that is available and up – downtime is simply unacceptable. At the same time, we need to deploy updates seamlessly.

To do that, we leverage the Rackspace Cloud and ObjectRocket MongoDB. The easy interface helps us get up and running quickly. And since we had little experience with MongoDB when we started our business, we found ObjectRocket’s management of MongoDB to be a perfect solution.

For us, we can scale easily and focus on our innovation. We don’t have to have someone in-house dealing with infrastructure. Our business can scale at any point and we’re not in a position to have someone on our staff to worry about that.

When you’re a startup, you’re competing with major players and incumbents. They have vast pools of money and resources. We need to be able to focus 90 percent of our time on innovation. Having access to Rackspace gives us a platform on which we can compete. It’s up, it’s available and it’s reliable. It gives us access to the same resources that the big guys have and we can release into production three times a day seamlessly and with no downtime.

Why is that important? Imagine presenting a deal in front of the board of directors and your CRM system goes down. With Rackspace, we have confidence that that’s not going to happen. It gives us peace of mind, and having access to human beings to help us build our strategy from day one was a huge help.

With that initial advice and infrastructure guidance, we were free to innovate and build our product so we can better facilitate collaborative B2B sales.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/crm-aint-enough-in-the-sales-2-0-world/feed/0Why Rackspace Managed Operations?http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-managed-operations/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-managed-operations/#commentsThu, 08 Jan 2015 18:00:47 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37672You have a business to run. You can’t get bogged down worrying about the day-to-day intricacies of infrastructure and operations. You’ve got bigger fish to fry than data backup, patching, security, proactive monitoring and incident response.

And you also can’t afford to be nickel-and-dimed.

You need a trusted partner to help you – to handle your cloud operations while you focus on building your business without the pain of hunting down and hiring top-dollar staff to do it for you.

That’s where Rackspace Managed Operations comes in.

Our Managed Operations Service Level gives you access to our Windows and Linux Systems Administrators any time you need to talk to them. This means when you have questions at 4:00 a.m. on a holiday, all you have to do is pick up the phone and give us a ring, and an expert will pick up the phone, ready and able to provide answers to your questions.

And that’s not all.

Are you planning for your next big event? Maybe your app is going to be promoted on a morning talk show, in a Super Bowl ad or featured as part of a startup competition. With Managed Operations, your Rackspace partners work closely with you to provide an in-depth look at how your architecture is configured. We identify areas for improvement and work with your team to build in fault-tolerance. We then help you to implement our best practices to deal with large influxes of traffic due to the overwhelming success of your product.

At Rackspace, uptime is our obsession. Our engineers are obsessed with designing and configuring our environment to be as stable as possible. We believe that the extra effort that is made towards running top tier data centers and infrastructure is worth every penny, so much so that we offer an industry-leading SLA payout. If our infrastructure fails you, as a Managed Operations customer you will receive a payout at two times our standard SLA payout. And as part of our Planned Event Program with a 10x Accelerator SLA, qualified Managed Operations customers can get a 10 times accelerated payout if our SLA is breached during a planned high-traffic event for up to 200 percent of your monthly invoice. It’s not about the payout, it’s about the responsibility we’re taking by hosting your application or website. We take your environment that seriously and we take an active role in ensuring availability so you can focus on your customers. We are a team of experts, built to make your job easier and take the headache out of system administration.

And on top of all that, Managed Operations comes built-in with launch assistance for 60 days and ongoing security guidance, code development assist, cloud backup, cloud app services management, platform maintenance, cloud app installation and maintenance, managed monitoring and response and a named account manager.

With Managed Operations, you get everything you need to make your cloud work for you, so you don’t have to work for it. It’s a level of support that other cloud hosting providers just can’t match.

Rackspace is the No. 1 Managed Cloud Company, and we are a leader in the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting. This means we lead the industry in providing a level of systems management on top of our rock-solid infrastructure that is unparalleled in the hosting industry. We achieve this by taking our 15 years of Managed Hosting experience and bringing it to businesses that are looking to expand into the cloud, adding in value and providing service and support built on our commitment to being the world’s greatest service company.

Managed Operations is a key part of that commitment.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/why-rackspace-managed-operations/feed/0Top New Year’s Resolutions For IT [Infographic]http://www.rackspace.com/blog/top-new-years-resolutions-for-it-infographic/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/top-new-years-resolutions-for-it-infographic/#commentsWed, 07 Jan 2015 21:00:50 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37674Happy 2015 to everyone in the IT industry! May all of your technology dreams and predictions come true! As many post their predictions for the cloud industry (including our very own CTO John Engates, with his Cloud Predictions for 2015) we’d like to offer up a few New Year’s Resolutions for IT decision makers to consider as they transition into the Managed Cloud era.

Now, I’m not talking about quitting smoking or cutting back on pizza; I’m talking about focusing on your customers, driving innovation and applying the knowledge you possess as an IT professional to give your organization a competitive advantage. If you’re tired of “keeping the lights on” or maintaining the status-quo while startups disrupt the business; or maybe you simply want to advance your career with a modern IT skills, then this post and webinar series is for you.

Emerging Themes for 2015Among all of our Advisory and Professional Service engagements in 2014, a few consistent themes emerged across customers of all sizes: 1) Move appropriate workloads to a trusted service provider, 2) Adopt a “service provider mentality” to become more agile to the business and 3) Modernize existing people, processes and technology to meet customer expectations. These three themes are dependent on having an experienced IT team leading the transformation for their business. Over the next few weeks, subject matter experts from our Strategy & Transformation team will share insights and best practices from a variety of projects in each of these areas through blog posts, webinars and eventually an e-book.

We’ve encapsulated these themes into three New Year’s Resolutions for IT Professionals. In 2015, I challenge you to evaluate your own IT operations and resolve to make a change. Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Get Out Of The Data Center Business

Are you spending 80 percent of your time “keeping the lights on,” consumed with the mundane non-differentiating task of managing infrastructure? For most businesses, managing and optimizing technology infrastructure simply does not offer any significant business value or competitive advantage. There is a rising trend of progressive and forward-thinking IT departments outsourcing their infrastructure and other non-differentiating technology services to service providers, and re-focusing their talent on activities such as service/vendor management, business process optimization, big data, analytics and mobile productivity.

Collaborate with a trusted, technology provider with best practices to help you transition various workloads and data center operations to those who live to serve you.

2. Become A Service Provider To The Business

You know your business better than any newly minted web startup. Take advantage of this opportunity and apply your own “startup mentality” to reinvent your IT organization. Modern IT teams are transforming their knowledge and use of technology to become true partners to the business and permanently address the issue of “shadow IT.” Through a combination of brokered services from external providers, and internal services delivered in a timely manner, they are acting more akin to “service innovators” as opposed to “system operators.” This means that central IT can ensure the levels of governance, security and accountability are met, deliver faster time to market, offer higher service levels and enable clarity in costs by leveraging charge-back/show-back to business units.

3. Modernize Your People, Process And Technology

Driven by quantum leaps in computing and global communications, the pace of innovation in the modern business environment has increased by orders of magnitude in the past few decades thanks to game-changing innovations such as cloud computing, robust open source solutions, big data and DevOps. The pace of innovation has shrunk from years to quarters and often from hours to minutes. In this fast-paced environment, developing new products and features while ensuring the highest levels of quality will make or break your business. New methodologies such as Agile and Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CICD) allow companies to maintain their competitive advantage while providing an integrated experience for customers.

The One Constant
The only thing that is constant in the IT industry is change. While technology fads come and go, your ability as an IT professional to navigate the abstract world of cloud technologies, providers and services is a great asset to your organization. Thank you John Engates and others in our industry for your 2015 cloud industry predictions, now let’s resolve to make them a reality in 2015!

To start off, register for a webinar or for the series, and be sure to join the conversation on Twitter by letting us know your IT resolutions with the hashtag #ITresolutions.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/top-new-years-resolutions-for-it-infographic/feed/0Public Folders Now Available In Hosted Exchange 2013http://www.rackspace.com/blog/public-folders-now-available-in-hosted-exchange-2013/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/public-folders-now-available-in-hosted-exchange-2013/#commentsWed, 17 Dec 2014 18:00:25 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37630The wait is finally over for public folders in Hosted Exchange 2013. Exchange Public Folders let you share calendars, tasks, contacts and email across your organization. You can access folders from Outlook and other Exchange mail clients, the same way you access your personal folders.

Starting today, Rackspace Hosted Exchange 2013 customers can log into the Cloud Office Control Panel and enable public folders. For new customers who sign up with Rackspace Hosted Exchange, you can migrate your existing folder structure and data into your new account.

There are some limitations to public folder usage. In March 2014, Microsoft published the Limits to Public Folders in Exchange Server 2013. Then in August, Microsoft released Exchange Server 2013 Cumulative Update 6 (CU6), which improved those limitations. Using CU6, Rackspace can support 25 public folders per email domain, and each folder may store up to 250 megabytes of data. When Microsoft releases new updates to further extend the limits, we will make them available to our customers.

To start using public folders, log into your Cloud Office Control Panel account and click the “Folders” link under the Microsoft Exchange section. Then click that big “Enable Public Folders” button.

Along with making public folders available in Hosted Exchange 2013 we’ve also updated our Cloud Office Control Panel. Wow, what a difference. We completely rewrote the folders administration interface. Control Panel users can create, delete, rename and mail-enable folders right there. You can also see the real-time status of folder creation from the Exchange servers. No more waiting for those spinning icons to refresh. It’s a very slick user interface and we’re proud of our software development teams for making it so easy to use.

It even has those little cog icons to quickly access common commands.

We encourage you to get started with the updated Cloud Office Control Panel today and start leveraging public folders in Hosted Exchange 2013. Click here to learn more about Hosted Exchange.

There are some markets just ripe for disruption. Uber upended the stagnant taxi industry. The Amazon Kindle altered how we read books. With MyDirectives, we’re disrupting how you make your medical wishes known.

It’s a problem that was waiting to be solved – real time access to a person’s medical wishes and directives at the time of a health emergency, directly from them. Medical professionals can hear your voice and read your words if you’re brought into the hospital, even if you can’t speak. It helps make sure a doctor won’t treat a stranger or “a medical event,” but rather treat you! To us, that’s a breath of fresh air whose time has come… and we owe that opportunity to the cloud.

The way we see it, advance care planning is better talked about around the comfort of the kitchen table than on the operating table.

“The innovation and access that MyDirectives.com offers means that a patient’s medical wishes, healthcare priorities and important documents are available to care providers and families when they need them most,” says Dr. Bill Frist, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader.

Through digital directives that include everything from written words to audio and video messages, MyDirectives is empowering people to be confident that they’ll get their voices heard in an emergency. MyDirectives – identified as one of the best 100 sites by PC Magazine – is transforming the doctor-consumer relationship by helping you create, store, update and share legal directives 24/7, to and from anywhere in the world. You can create them from the comfort of your own home with input from your family — before you have an emergency. From there, your directives are stored in our cloud and can be shared with doctors, health plans and hospitals. Users can edit them and access them at any time from anywhere. Dr. Peter Saul, a senior intensive care specialist in Australia and Director of the Newcastle Private Hospital’s intensive care unit, says MyDirectives is “the first time I have seen a website addressing a complex issue using a truly modern, tech-savvy and consumer-oriented approach.”

Says Dr. Robert Fine, Clinical Director of the Office of Clinical Ethics and Palliative Care at Baylor Health System, “There is a strong consensus that [MyDirectives] is a significant improvement over the status quo of advance care planning, with a very high potential to improve the quantity, quality and clarity of advance care plans. Speaking personally as one who has worked closely with legislators and others to enhance advance care planning and as one familiar with a myriad of other advance care planning processes and tools across the country, I can confidently say that MyDirectives is visionary.”

In addition to changing the way people create, store and share their plans, one of our goals is to change how those plans are thought about and discussed.

None of this would be possible without the Rackspace Cloud. The data needs to be stored somewhere secure yet accessible in an instant. It’s through a networked system that we can make this information safely and securely available to medical professionals while adhering to stringent regulations in the USA (e.g. HIPAA) as well as those of many other countries around the world.

We’re doing all of this in a world of ones and zeros. For us, support is not just Fanatical, but critical. We require proactive alerts and insights from the experts. This gives us the confidence, which in turn gives our customers and clients the confidence that we’re doing right by them.

We need a hosting partner that’s a global player. We can’t be distracted by upstarts offering us a quick deal. At the same time, security for us is imperative. The healthcare industry is historically reluctant to change, and we need to inspire confidence.

Our goal is not to disrupt the technology – in fact, we’ve entrusted that to our team at Rackspace as they’ve done it time and again in industry after industry. Our goal is to disrupt the way we live by giving consumers the confidence they’ll have a voice (for real!) in their health care when they need it the most.

Diversification is a vitally important business strategy that applies to everything from your finances, your workforce and especially your IT layer. The same way you should never place all of your cash reserves into a single investment or hire only database administrators, you should avoid hosting your critical data on a single device or depend heavily on a single technology and, when possible, avoid deploying at a single location.

Not long ago technical diversification within the IT layer required a sizeable budget. It was a luxury of only large, well-funded organizations could afford. However, the Rackspace Cloud, which offers an economical abundance of compute and storage resources, was an eye-opening introduction to the performance gains and uptime benefits of multi-node architecture, spreading code over a number of workload-specific virtual machines rather than a single, all-purpose server.

It wasn’t long after the cloud gained mainstream status that Rackspace introduced RackConnect, a service that allowed for even further diversification of infrastructure by combining our portfolio of virtual and dedicated services into a single offering: the hybrid cloud. Again, our customers realized greater reliability and performance by spreading components of their web application over a combination of virtual and dedicated resources, and in many cases their IT spend shrunk through intelligent cloud consumption.

We continue this trend of providing you solutions that allow for growth, stability and performance with the addition of RackConnect RegionLink to our RackConnect portfolio of connectivity services.

What Is RackConnect RegionLink?

RackConnect RegionLink is our new fully managed network connectivity service that enables you to transfer data between Rackspace Regions at a lower latency and with better throughput than over the Internet. It does this by utilizing an MPLS VPN connection over the Rackspace backbone. RackConnect RegionLink allows you to architect a solution that spans multiple Rackspace Regions using a private, low-latency connection. It is a practical and cost effective way for customers who cannot tolerate the risk of unexpected downtime or data loss to mitigate the risk of an outage due to a problem with a single Rackspace Region.

In addition to business continuity, servers in multiple regions can significantly reduce page load times by minimizing the physical distance between your end users and your servers.

The Alternatives

Customers architecting across multiple regions and data centers is nothing new to Rackspace. Over the past year we’ve seen a growing number of customers turn to geographically dispersed configurations to meet increasingly stringent performance, stability and data integrity requirements. However, before the introduction of RackConnect RegionLink, the main alternatives came with a number of inherent problems.

Site-to-Site VPN Using Firewalls

You can establish secure inter-region connectivity using firewalls on each end to establish and maintain an L2TP/IPSec VPN tunnel between regions. However, this solution presents a number of drawbacks. First, there is overhead due to the encryption as well as the performance cost of routing traffic through multiple layers before it can reach the other data center. Second, reliable throughput across this kind of connection would require expensive, high-end firewalls on each side. Also, unlike RackConnect RegionLink, there is no redundancy, making the firewalls a single point of failure on each end. And lastly, management of this solution would be outside of Rackspace’s currently scope of support, requiring our customers to maintain and troubleshoot the connection.

Using A Network Service Provider

It’s also possible to achieve geographical redundancy by using a third-party to facilitate the region-to-region connection. However, this option is costly option and the introduction of an additional service provider can increase the operational overhead of the entire configuration and make management of the connection cumbersome.

RackConnect RegionLink To The Rescue

RackConnect RegionLink was designed to allow for fast, reliable and secure inter-region private connectivity while solving for all of the problems created in the previous scenarios.

Here are some of the cool features RackConnect RegionLink offers:

It bypasses multiple layers of network devices to improve latency

Throughput is more reliable than using upgraded firewalls

Redundancy is already built in to the design

Fully managed and backed by Fanatically Support

You can specify a range of speeds to meet performance and budget requirements

How can you take advantage of RackConnect RegionLink?

RackConnect RegionLink is available now to a limited number of customers in U.S. Region only. For more information, visit our RackConnect RegionLink FAQ or contact your account team regarding availability and pricing.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/rackconnect-regionlink-get-fast-reliable-secure-inter-region-private-connectivity/feed/0Cloud Predictions For 2015http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-predictions-for-2015/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-predictions-for-2015/#commentsWed, 10 Dec 2014 14:35:29 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37546For the past few years I’ve used this holiday period as a chance to do some prognostication. It’s a fun exercise – looking back at trends from the previous 12 months and trying to predict what’s next.

Looking back at my 2014 cloud predictions, I’m fairly pleased with how I did. Wearable technologies took a huge step forward with the Apple Watch announcement, specialized clouds based on workload continued to enter the conversation, open source grew and container technology emerged as a force. Looking back, I’d give myself a B.

So what can we expect in 2015? Below are my predictions.

John Engates spoke more about his cloud predictions for 2015 in a live Google Hangout. Watch a full recording here:

Cloud Choices Abound
Businesses will be faced with more choices in the cloud than ever before. Do you go for cheap? Do you go for the most bells and whistles? And how do you know which one you’ll need in five years? 2015 sees the emergence of a multi-cloud world where you’ll be able to string together cloud services from various providers based on your specific workloads. But with more choices comes more responsibility. Price isn’t the only factor to consider. “Oh, it’s cheap!” will no longer sell cloud. Cloud providers must differentiate themselves in stronger ways. Customers will gravitate toward the solutions that best address their specific business needs, whether that’s based on support, a mix of bare metal and public cloud, private clouds or myriad other options. For example, Rackspace now offers three distinct types of private clouds – OpenStack, Microsoft and VMware – to give customers the choice of how they proceed with private cloud.

It’s Not The Cost That Counts
Along with the vast number of cloud choices, the focus on what drives the most value will be a key theme for 2015. Value isn’t just about cost – it’s also about the time and energy you spend managing and scaling your environment. So, while providers will become more agnostic, the importance of a trusted partner will grow stronger, whether you rely on that partner to manage your public or private cloud, automate your DevOps or keep tabs on your apps, like Google Apps for Work. Companies will have to ask themselves if they want to swell their payrolls hiring the resources needed to manage all of their tools and technologies. This will force companies to determine what matters most to them – focusing on IT management or on their business – and decide who they can partner with to deliver the most value.

OpenStack Gets Boring
In 2015, OpenStack will celebrate its fifth birthday. And that birthday will be boring. That’s a good thing. When a technology matures, it becomes less and less exciting. That’s where we see OpenStack going. Forrester research agrees. In a Quick Take from OpenStack Summit Paris, Forrester wrote: “At its Paris summit, the OpenStack Foundation celebrated the 10th release of the platform (code name: Juno). What stood out about this latest iteration and the progress of its ever-growing ecosystem of vendors, users, and service providers was the lack of excitement that comes with maturity. The Juno release addressed many challenges holding back enterprise adoption to this point and showed signs that 2015 may be the year its use shifts over from mostly test and development to mainstream production deployments.” We hope that maturity brings with it simplification – if we make OpenStack as easy as possible to use, manage and scale, more and more users will adopt it.

Bigger Data
For the past few years we’ve predicted a major upswing in the importance of big data and the tools and skills needed to manage it at scale. In 2015, that need for big data will get, well, bigger. Enterprises are catching on to the big data wave, but they don’t have the skills needed in house to pull necessary value out of that data. The explosion of connected devices will further fuel the flames, creating more data that needs to be extracted and analyzed. Data scientists will be a hot commodity, but much like the DevOps revolution of 2014, top data talent will be difficult to come by and expensive to hire. But big data won’t slow down – look for as many as five disruptive new big data technologies to emerge in the coming year. At the same time, current technologies like Hadoop will become even more ingrained into your business. To navigate the increasingly complex big data landscape, companies will outsource their big data needs to remove the burden and cost of doing big data internally. Enterprises will demand a shortcut.

IT Gets Sensored
Cars, smartwatches, tablets, smartphones – sensors will be embedded in EVERYTHING! (Well, maybe not every single thing, but most things.) If we so choose, we can be connected to the Internet 24x7x365, and every product we buy will have some sort of embedded sensor to collect, transmit or distribute data. Look how Apple Pay is already disrupting the payment industry by giving users zero-click buying power in their pocket. And Apple Watch is going to take that one step further. This goes well beyond the BYOD conversations of yesteryear. Embedded devices and sensors are taking us into uncharted territory. With all of these devices generating all of this data, IT will have to exact some level of control to ensure that security and data integrity are not compromised. But it’s a delicate balance, as end users won’t want to be restricted in what devices and solutions they use.

Containers, Containers, Containers
Next year, container technologies and adoption will grow immensely. With Docker leading the pack, container use in production environments will continue to grow. Docker won’t be alone. A number of container-focused alternatives will emerge in an attempt to knock Docker out of the water. The technology big dogs themselves will likely look to launch their own container solutions – either through acquisition or homegrown technology. Containers’ speed and portability took hold in 2014. 2015 will be the year the ship really sets sail.

The CMO Turns Into A CMT
Gartner predicted that by 2017, marketing will spend more on technology than IT. Meanwhile, according to Forrester Research, roughly 40 percent of marketing leaders rank technology as the No. 1 area for improvement in their departments. Marketers will rely more heavily on tools like collaboration software, CRM, automation, CMS and social. In 2015, marketers will be increasingly called upon to make decisions about how to adopt these new technologies. They’ll have to add more technology chops as the demand for tech know-how continually increases, thus forcing the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to become the Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT).

Secure It
Nearly every company I’ve met with in the past year mentions security. In 2015, security will evolve more into a service than a series of products daisy-chained together to build a solution. The NSA spying on citizens has caused businesses to rethink how they go about security and reconsider where their data lives. In 2014, more options emerged, whether it was the reemergence of single-tenant bare metal servers or a boom in interest in private clouds to secure sensitive information and applications. Security has to be always on, and delivering security as a service is something we’ll see bubble up to the surface next year.

Alternative Silicon Rising
People have long predicted that new processing architectures were just about to take off in the hyper-scale datacenter world. We’ve heard buzz around ARM-based solutions for years, but have seen products that only fit niche applications. Low performance and a fragmented software ecosystem were a big problem. That changed this year. 2014 saw big news around Google’s involvement with IBM and OpenPOWER, and Cavium bringing out a server-grade ARM platform. 2015 will be the year that alternative silicon really begins to rise. Watch this space.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/cloud-predictions-for-2015/feed/0Use Grafana For All Of Your Monitoring Data, Rackspace Or Otherwisehttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/use-grafana-for-all-of-your-monitoring-data-rackspace-or-otherwise/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/use-grafana-for-all-of-your-monitoring-data-rackspace-or-otherwise/#commentsTue, 09 Dec 2014 16:00:52 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=37518At Rackspace, we continually work to make it easier for you to gather and view your monitoring data. We want the monitoring data for whichever products you use to be immediately available to you.

Now we are going beyond data for just Rackspace products. No matter how you generate monitoring data for any kind of server, our infrastructure can receive and display that information so you can have a consistent experience across all of your products, Rackspace or otherwise.

We hear a theme

We know that many of you want complete flexibility with a feature-rich metrics dashboard and graphing editor. Grafana is one of the most mentioned names in these conversations. It is an open source frontend with powerful visualization features for time-series data.

We provide a simple solution

Today we’ll show you how we make it simple to bring up a Grafana dashboard. What makes this super simple is that instead of using a standalone graphite backend, we point this Grafana instance at our Cloud Metrics service.

While we are still working out the details to make this a more smooth user experience, we would like you to check out the instructions below and let us know what you think.

Deploy the Grafana Instance for Cloud Metrics

Here is the blow-by-blow if you want to create a Grafana dashboard:

Go to the Orchestration section of the Control Panel, from there click on “Create Stack” button

After clicking on “Next Step,” you will need to fill in the parameters required by the Heat template.

Fill in:

API Key

Username

Tenant ID

Click “Create Stack”

After you click the button “Create Stack,” you will land on the page showing that the Heat template is being executed. When it is done, you will be able to retrieve the IP address, the password and username for your Grafana server.

Using Your Dashboard

You can now point your browser to the IP address of the new server and fill in the user name and password from the previous step to access the Grafana instance.

When you start creating a graph, you will notice that all of the metrics submitted by Cloud Monitoring are already available here in the following format:

The entity IDs and check IDs are the generated by Cloud Monitoring to guarantee the uniqueness of the metrics.

How to find entity and check IDs

Entity and check IDs are not very human-friendly strings. While we are implementing a solution to map the entity and check names to these IDs, you can locate entity ID and check ID in Cloud Intelligence monitoring details page and check details page, respectively.

Upload Grafana Dashboard for Database Instances

For your convenience, we have built a Grafana dashboard to help you get set up with your Cloud Database MySQL instances.

Then you need to modify it to match your instance by replacing all the “_rax_entity_id_” in the file with the entity ID of your database instance.

After that, you can upload the file to Grafana and see the dashboard magically showing up.

Additional Information

How much does it cost?

This costs only as much as the server you spin up. Everything else is free.

The dashboard is free: Grafana is an open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor. There is no cost to the software itself. You can choose to deploy it anywhere and you are only responsible for maintaining and paying for the server it runs on.

The metrics are free: we want you to have access to your metrics so you can make informed decisions about your infrastructure. Our monitoring service is free and so are the metrics that we store.

Should I use Cloud Intelligence or Grafana?

Cloud Intelligence is another free option we provide to help you make your infrastructure choices. It is designed to answer what we consider to be the most obvious questions that anyone asks about their servers. While it covers a lot of use cases and has a certain amount of customization, if you want total customizability you can use Grafana as an alternative.

As an additional comparison, Cloud Intelligence does more than just show pretty graphs; it is a control panel that allows you to manage your Cloud Monitoring configuration. So, while Grafana might give you total control over your graphs, Cloud Intelligence gives you total control to create, delete and edit your monitoring configuration.

The good news is that Cloud Intelligence and Grafana are using the same metrics stored in the product called Cloud Metrics, which Racker Alex Scammon showcased recently in his blog post. This means that you can try both and choose the one that works for you.

Demo Grafana Instance

We have a demo Grafana set up and running from time to time. Please reach out to us and we can share the server information.

Next

Dashboard for your Cloud Servers: Please try it out and build some dashboards for your Cloud Servers! We would love to hear back from and exchange Grafana dashboards.

StatsD Integration: In addition to the Cloud Monitoring data, you can submit additional metrics data through the public API too! In fact, we have just finished integration with StatsD so that it just takes a few lines of StatsD configuration change to push the same metrics data into Cloud Metrics. In this way, you can easily migrate into StatsD/ Grafana stack with Cloud Metrics as its elastic storage. If you are interested in being considered for the beta testing after we are done with the current internal testing, please let me know.

Send Your Feedback

As always, we love to hear from you! Please provide your feedback through our feedback portal or join the conversation on IRC (freenode #blueflood).

Credits

Last but not the least, there are many thanks go to the following other product teams from Rackspace who contributed to this capability:

Cloud Orchestration for releasing an awesome product and helping us with the creation of the Heat template.

Cloud Databases for analyzing and contributing to the enhancement of Cloud Monitoring MySQL check and the definition of Grafana dashboard.

Cloud Monitoring for the fantastic platform upon which all of this work is based.